Does Daryl Davis hold the key to racial harmony?

Does
Daryl Davis
hold the key
to racial
harmony?
By Mike Gruss
154 January/February 2014 | BethesdaMagazine.com
The Silver Spring
musician says
that by getting to
know members of
the Ku Klux Klan
and letting them
get to know him,
he’s fostering
mutual respect and
understanding.
It’s a simple idea.
Maybe too simple.
ben tankersley
Musician and author Daryl Davis
holds one of the hoods that he
says was given to him by former
Ku Klux Klan members.
BethesdaMagazine.com | January/February 2014 155
daryl davis
Daryl Davis is a
showman.
On this Saturday night at The Birchmere in Alexandria, four white men
in black shirts and black pants saunter
onto the stage. Then Davis, a 55-yearold African-American wearing a gold
shirt and black jeans with a cellphone
attached to his belt, takes his place in
the spotlight.
He opens with a showman’s query:
“What do you people want to hear?”
The audience shouts the names of
1960s rock ’n’ roll favorites, and the
band kicks off a series of twangy, boogie-woogie songs. Davis plays in the
flamboyant style of Jerry Lee Lewis or
Little Richard, sometimes chopping the
keys karate-style and grimacing as if the
music pains him.
Though Davis lives across the state line
in Silver Spring, he addresses the crowd
as if he were performing in another
country. “Every time I play Northern Virginia, y’all call it rockabilly,” he says late in
the set. He describes the genre by naming
Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. He talks
about the same music being referred to
as rock ’n’ roll, but played by Bo Diddley
and Chuck Berry.
It would be easy to parse this explanation by race. Presley and Holly, both
white, fall under one set of rules. Diddley and Berry, both black, under
another. But before the audience can
think too hard about it, before they can
tell if the speech is the setup for a joke or
part of a larger point about how artists
are viewed based on the color of their
skin, Davis moves on.
“In Chicago,” he says, “we call this the
boogie-woogie.”
And that may be one of the least
polarizing things Daryl Davis has to say
about race.
When he appears on television,
whether it’s The Geraldo Rivera Show
or National Geographic or CNN, Daryl
Davis’ own history rarely comes up. The
hosts don’t really want to know who he
is or where he comes from; they want
sound bites. Davis provides them.
The subject of a 75-minute documentary scheduled for release early this year,
he has become a media-friendly outlier
when it comes to the über-touchy topic
of race in America. He alternately is
regarded as a role model in a post-racial
society—and as a publicity hound who
has put his own interests above the African-American community by ignoring a
not-so-distant struggle.
The fact that he has played with some
of the country’s most revered musicians,
well, that only adds to the allure.
156 January/February 2014 | BethesdaMagazine.com
In the early days of rock ’n’ roll,
Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry played to
segregated crowds. Davis was too young
to witness the concerts firsthand, but the
photos intrigued him.
courtesy photos
Davis has performed
with lots of celebrities.
Clockwise from top:
Davis with Billy Joel,
Jerry Lee Lewis and
Chuck Berry.
Davis is a gifted keyboard player and
bandleader. He has the kind of enviable
talent that has attracted audiences, though
never the fame of a Little Richard or a
Chuck Berry. But Davis believes his true
gift is this: He wants to be seen as a catalyst in resolving race relations in America.
He is a black man with friends in the Klan.
And now we come to the background
that Davis says helps explain his views.
Davis’ parents worked for the Foreign
Service. He describes the international
schools he attended as “a little U.N.,”
with Italians, Germans and Nigerians.
In 1968, when he was 10 years old and
living in Belmont, Mass., he was one of
two black students in his school. During
a parade that spring, as Boston seethed
with tension over civil rights, he marched
in his Cub Scout uniform from Lexington
to Concord. Onlookers pelted him with
rocks and debris and bottles, he says.
Davis didn’t understand why. “My
first thought was they didn’t like the
Scouts.” His parents told him it was
because of his race. Six years later, while Davis was attending Rockville’s Thomas S. Wootton High
School, Matt Koehl, then the head of the
American Nazi Party, came to speak to his
class. Koehl pointed at Davis, one of two
black students in the room, and told him,
“We’re going to ship you back to Africa.” Another student asked: “What if they
don’t go?”
“They will be exterminated in the
upcoming race war,” Koehl said.
Afterward, Davis started reading
everything he could about hate groups,
and today he claims to have read every
book written about the Ku Klux Klan.
The confrontation stuck with him like a
song he couldn’t get out of his head. And
rather than ignore it, he plays the refrain
over and over again.
How can they hate me when they don’t
even know me?
ben tankersley
Music “brought
people together.
I like that,” says
Davis, pictured
here at home in
Silver Spring.
“Black kids and white kids would
bounce up out of their seats, knock down
the ropes and start dancing and boogying in the aisles together,” Davis said in a
2011 interview with Amerika.org, a site
for the self-described New Right. “This
had never happened before.”
Those images became an inspiration.
“I wanted to do that. I wanted to make
people happy,” he says. Music “brought
people together. I like that.”
It’s not much of a stretch, he adds, to
apply the same idea to race relations.
Music depends on harmony and dissonance. Dissonance, Davis says, should
only be used to create a certain mood.
As he explains this, he stands up from
a couch and plays an ominous coupling
of notes on the piano that dominates his
family room.
But harmony is different, he says. It
does not come naturally. “You learn to
play harmony,” he says.
About the same time as his encounter with Koehl, Davis taught himself to
play piano. He attended Howard University on a music scholarship, graduating
in 1980 and going on to meet as many
musicians as he could, taking gigs as a
session player or leading a band or backing national artists. “Music became my
profession,” he says, “but the whole time
my obsession was racism.”
Dozens of photos line the wall in his
family room, a Who’s Who of ’60s and
’70s musicians. There’s Ted Nugent and
rock and doo-wop groups such as The
Platters and The Coasters. There are his
idols, Presley and Berry. Over the past
30 years, Davis has played with Berry
and with Little Richard and even with
Bill Clinton on sax.
But as Davis backed some of music’s
biggest names, he continued to untangle the question of race. The story Davis
likes to repeat most often is about a gig
at the Silver Dollar Lounge, a truck stop
in Frederick, where a white man told
him he played like Jerry Lee Lewis. The
man said he’d never seen a black man
play like that.
Baffled, Davis asked the stranger if he
knew who taught Lewis how to play. The
man did not.
A black man, Davis said. (Lewis told
him so, he says.)
The two kept talking, a friendly conversation about the roots of rock ’n’ roll and
blues and boogie-woogie, and eventually
the man mentioned that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. And this is where
the story should end. This is where others would have walked or run away, where
they would have ended the conversation,
gracefully sidestepping the ignorant.
Instead, the two exchanged phone
numbers.
“If I had a gig, I’d call him and he’d
come out,” Davis says.
The man would bring his Klan friends.
Later, Davis hung out with them. He listened. He treated them with respect.
Sometimes he knew the history and
meaning of the Klan traditions better
than they did. He operated on the principle that people who have a coffee or a
beer together create a shared experience.
“I have issues with their beliefs,” Davis
says, “but I realize I’m a good influence
on people.”
Davis’ wife of six years, Brenda, calls
her husband a “human magnet.”
“I admire him for what he does,” she
says. “Has it taken some getting used
to? Yes.”
Brenda, who is white and from Luray,
Va., says she has seen a change in her
BethesdaMagazine.com | January/February 2014 157
daryl davis
own friends, some of whom originally
disapproved of her dating a black man
but have rethought their positions.
Out of human kindness or something
less easily defined, Daryl Davis says he
convinces racists not to hate him. Some
figure if Davis isn’t so bad, maybe other
black people aren’t, either. Heck, maybe
they’ll even quit the Klan. And maybe
one day, Davis says, the Klan will simply disappear.
Some might view that as positive
thinking; others might call it unrealistic. To Davis, it hardly matters. Today
he claims to be friends with more than
a dozen current or former Klan members. And that’s why he has been on Geraldo in the ’90s and on Jenny Jones and
on CNN, where one anchor deemed
him “strange indeed” for attempting
to bridge the impossibly wide chasm
between himself and the Klan.
Lest anyone doubt his results, on a
Sunday morning this past September, he
goes to his closet and brings out a small,
black traveling bag, the kind you would
pack for a short weekend away, and pulls
out the white robes, the ones he doesn’t
keep locked up off-site, the ones he says
friends gave him after quitting the Klan.
Harmony does not come naturally.
In 1997, Davis wrote about these
interactions in Klan-Destine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey in the Ku
Klux Klan (New Horizon Press). Readers online praised the book for its honesty. Kirkus Reviews described it as a
“futile and pointless volume.”
“The dual dangers of this book are
that some readers will find tacit support for their beliefs that blacks are easily led,” the reviewer wrote, “and others
will view the Klan as ‘not all that bad’
and perhaps join where they otherwise
might not have.”
Davis says NAACP leaders have criticized
him, as well, though neither the national
chapter nor the Montgomery County chapter returned calls to confirm that.
In 2007, administrators at Longwood
University, a rural Virginia school where
the student population is 85 percent
white, made the book required reading for incoming freshmen. Other colleges have invited him to speak. Among
them: Cleveland State University, Penn
State University and Carleton College in
Minnesota. More than 15 years after the
book’s release, Davis lectures as many as
50 times a year even as he plays about
200 gigs, from private shows to Kentucky blues festivals to opening for blues
guitarist and singer Buddy Guy. And
early this year, Figura Media will release
a documentary about him called The
Daryl Davis Project.
Amid all this attention, some question Davis’ intentions. Others doubt the
depths of the Klan members’ conversions.
Davis has heard the criticisms. This must
be some kind of publicity stunt. He’s not an
academic, so where does he get off claiming he knows something about the Klan that
others don’t. He says African-Americans
who criticize him for befriending the Klan
are essentially taking the same hate-based
position they despise: They’re labeling him
before they’ve even listened to him.
Davis makes his case by playing a DVD.
The first clip, from The Geraldo Rivera
Show nearly 20 years ago, features Klan
members and their children. It’s typical
talk-show tawdriness, and Davis was in
the audience that day. Years later, according to Davis, he called one of the Klan
158 January/February 2014 | BethesdaMagazine.com
women who appeared on the show and
offered to drive her to visit her husband
in prison. The next clip, public television
footage filmed five years after her appearance on Geraldo, shows both the woman
and her daughter renouncing the Klan at
a public ceremony for Martin Luther King
Jr. Day in Silver Spring. They hug Davis
and tell the crowd they love him.
In another video, one that aired last
summer on the National Geographic
Channel series Taboo, a former Klan
leader named Don sits at Davis’ dining
room table. The two sip bottled water
and talk about a Klan event in Missouri
that the show paid Davis to attend. Don
talks about how his friendship with
Davis has changed his views, and says
the Klan largely disbanded in Maryland
after a few of the guys became friends
with the musician.
“My beliefs then are,” Don says,
choosing his words carefully, “completely different than they are now.”
Davis, watching the clip with a visitor,
pops up from the couch.
“Am I wrong for sitting down with people when I get results like that?” he asks.
But is it really that simple?
Davis’ logic follows that if Klan members can just get to know him, they won’t
be able to hate him, and vice versa. But
how can you ever really know what’s in
another person’s heart?
Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery,
Ala., says the center gets calls about Davis
every few years. Potok has neither met
Davis nor heard of many of the Klan members the musician claims as friends. Regardless, “the idea of being nice to the Klan is a
pretty silly one,” Potok says.
courtesy photo
Davis at a KKK rally
Davis started reading everything he could about hate
groups, and today he claims to
have read every book written
about the Ku Klux Klan.
daryl davis
Elyshia Aseltine, an assistant professor of sociology, anthropology and criminal justice at Towson University, studies
how race factors into people’s self-perception. She says Davis likely has “a narrow understanding of how racism plays
out.” Racism is more nuanced than it
was 50 years ago, she says, and manifests
itself in people’s decisions about where
to live or shop or send their kids to
school, rather than in Klan membership.
She worries that Davis has become
an exception to his Klan friends, not
the rule, and that their views remain
unchanged.
Consider Gary, a former Klansman
from Washington County in western
Maryland who asked that his last name
not be used because “crazies” could look
him up. Gary has been to more than two
dozen of Davis’ concerts, and Davis once
secured tickets for him to see Chuck
Berry. Gary says the hard-core Klan
members “can’t stand” Davis because
they hate all black people. But many others like the musician, he says.
Gary counts himself among the latter.
He’s a separatist and would prefer that
the world “be all white.” But he attended
Davis’ wedding, even though it was to a
white woman.
“I don’t think it’s right,” he says of the
interracial marriage. “But I’d never say
anything about it.”
If the purpose of befriending Klansmen is to somehow chip away at racebased hate, how do you measure victory?
In robes? In someone holding his disapproval in check? In a change of heart?
At The Birchmere, Davis throws a
blue hand towel over the keys and bangs
out an extended, flourish-filled solo. He
likes to introduce stunts into his sets, occasionally playing the piano through flames
created with the help of lighter fluid.
“I feel it,” he shouts. “It’s in my soul.”
At one point during a vivacious ver-
sion of “Johnny B. Goode,” Davis moves
away from the keyboard. The bass player
lays down the groove. The drummer stays
on time. Davis makes a show of watching his lead guitar player so intently that
he appears to be studying how to play the
instrument for the first time. Finally, he
nods as if to say: Let me try.
Then, still facing the crowd, Davis
stands in front of the lead guitar player
and, as if he has just learned the song
from those few seconds of careful observation, takes over the solo, playing the
instrument behind his back.
It’s the signature move of the evening: white fingers guiding the instrument, black fingers playing the strings,
and a crowd behaving exactly the way he
always dreamed. Listening. n
Mike Gruss has written for newspapers in
Ohio, Indiana and Virginia and now lives
in Alexandria. To comment on this story,
email [email protected].
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160 January/February 2014 | BethesdaMagazine.com